Ladder career path for business growth success process concept. Wood block stacking as step stair ... [+] with arrow up. Hand putting wooden cube block on top pyramid

Now that the new year is here, youve probably recommitted to your goals with conviction. Maybe youve vowed that this is the year you get a promotion, get your productivity under control, or finally achieve the work-life balance you have been craving. Whatever your aspirations, one truth remains: change is hard.

No one knows this better than the worlds leading expert in habit formation, BJ Fogg, PhD. Dr. Fogg leads the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University and he has personally coached over 40,000 peopleand influenced countless more, including Instagram founder Mike Krieger and best-selling author Tim Ferriss.

Foggs new book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything, cracks the code on how human behavior works with a groundbreaking model that doesnt involve tricks, hacks, or willpower.

Melody Wilding: High-achievers like to set big goals, and a lot of them. Where can this approach go wrong or backfire? Why is tiny better?

BJ Fogg: I think everybody, high-achiever or not, can benefit from learning the tiny habits method and what's behind it. It's really learning the skills of change and in Tiny Habits, I present a systematic way that anybody can use to learn how to bring habits into their lives.

If you are high achieving in one arealike you're really good at taking exams or are very good at making presentations and very creativewe tend to also think that we have gifts when it comes to changing our behavior. That's not necessarily true.

High-achievers are just like everybody else when it comes to motivation: our motivation goes up and down over time. We have to accept that fact and acknowledge that we all face struggle.

High achievers are more susceptible to self-criticism, being hard on themselves, and not being very empathetic. When we don't achieve these lofty goals, we think, I'm talented in other areas and things should come easy to me. In my own life I have thought, BJ, you're good at a lot of things, but that doesn't mean you're necessarily good at changing your behavior. That was a hard lesson.

Wilding: What are some of the most common work or professional related habits you see people trying to develop?

Fogg: Productivity is very high on the list. That's not a habit, but it's an aspiration that people have.

In my lab, we did three studies about how people aspire to change. And it turns out, that while productivity means different things to different people, we identified that phrasing matters. What worked best was when people said they wanted to be more productive in things that mattered to them.

Other people want to look at how to reduce their work stress and how they can avoid letting the stress of the day affect their personal life, which are big and hard to achieve goals because we dont have many role models.

Wilding: Where do you start when it comes to developing new work habits?

Fogg: The first place to start is to get clear on what you really want. So don't think yet about the specific habits, like I'm going to read 60 minutes a day. Think about what you really want, that tiny first step, which is clarifying your aspiration. What is it that you want? Reducing stress at work is different than being more productive. Building your business network is different from making more money. Spend some time and reflection writing down different things that you want. Habits that are related to things we really want are the easiest to form.

Wilding: Why do you say we can never break a habit?

Fogg: The phrase break a habit has been with us for a long, long time. And the reason I'm going after it is because it sets up the wrong expectation of how to actually rid yourself of unwanted behavior.

The way we use the term today implies that you put in a lot of force, in a single moment, and by doing that, you're donethe habit is broken and resolved. That's not the right expectation for most habits.

The alternative that I'm putting forward is untangling a habit, which sets up an entirely different expectation. Number one, you can't do it instantly. Just like undoing a big phone cord or a big string Christmas lights, its a process and cant be done instantly. Number two, you cant start with the hardest tangle first. You start with the easiest one. And third, you will get there. You cant do it at once, but its not impossible.

For those three reasons and more, untangling a habit sets up a much better expectation about the process and helps people do it in the right way rather than thinking, If I just had enough willpower in this one moment, then Id be able to change.

Wilding: I work with many highly sensitive leaders. One of their greatest strengths is thinking deeply, but they can also get caught in analysis-paralysis and perfectionism. Can you talk about the info-action fallacy and how people can get past it?

Fogg: Early in the book, I talk about how information alone does not reliably change people's behavior. There is a fallacy that if we just have the right information, people will change. But people believe what they want to believe. So information that they dont want to believe, they dont and vice versa. And nowadays with so much information out there, you tend to only encounter things that you're looking for, so you're not exposed to what goes against what you're looking for usually.

I encountered this a lot at Stanford where I've been teaching for 20 years. In the Stanford context, I call it the big brain problem. The students are smart people who know how to research and analyze. But guess what? That doesn't mean theyre taking action. In fact, they may be delaying action by thinking and talking and analyzing things from every single angle. Its helpful to give the problem a name and call it out.

Wilding: How do you deal with it?

Fogg: You don't really learn anything until you put something real into the world. Otherwise youre not learning. Learning involves getting out there, making mistakes, and learning what goes wrong and what goes right. It may feel good to sit around and talk about what you want to change, but you only make real progress when you ship and build things.

In my classes, I give students deadlines. For example, X has to be implemented and put into the real world by Monday at noon. Or Ill tell them we have 45 minutes left in class and they cant leave until they pilot a small intervention. Theyll say We cant do that! but I say, Yes, you can. Just get started. All of them make it out of the class on time, and better yet, half of the interventions they created actually show promise several days later.

In the workplace, I train industry innovators to focus on snap testing, which involves going from nothing to rolling out a pilot and getting results within four hours. This isnt a minimum viable product. Were talking a really, really quick test of the psychology. Nine out of ten snap tests will fail. So expect the first one to fail. Setting the expectations low takes the pressure off. But what you find is the odds of success are way better than 10 percent. Once you find the little nugget that works I call it a tiny machine you grow and build it.

Wilding: You give a name to a new emotion shine. Can you explain what that is and how readers can apply it in their work lives, specifically to tackle negative responses like shame, guilt, and self-criticism?

Fogg: This is really the most important part of Tiny Habits. Shine is the name that I gave to that great, positive emotion you feel when you are successful. When you do a behavior and you feel successful, your brain goes, Whoa! What just happened? Im going to do that again. Your brain releases neurochemicals and takes notice when you have that strong positive reaction, which is what wires the habitnot repetition.

In Tiny Habits, I talk about the technique of celebration, which you can also use to wire habits more quickly. I give 100 ways to celebrate in the book. Pick what works for you.

My real mission is to help people, to teach people, and to give people permission to feel shine without pushing it away. Instead, feel it and turn up the volume on it, which also help others around them.

Wilding: Lets say youve been trying to form a new habit, but its not working. How can you troubleshoot?

Fogg: The first thing you start with is looking at the prompt, or did I have something to remind me to do the habit? If you dont, create one. You do that by anchoring it to a routine. For example, after I start the coffee maker, then I get out my to-do list.

If youre actively using a prompt and its not working, look at the next part of the behavior model, which is your ability to do the habit. If the habit is really easy to do and youre still not doing it, then you know you have a motivation problem, where you have a decision to make about whether you want to choose a different habit or not.

Read more:
Forget Big GoalsWhy Tiny Habits Change Everything, According to a Stanford Psychologist - Forbes